LittleDavid

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  1. Yeah, in my letters I think I'm going to try and appeal to their sense of profitability.

    Stress the fact (as I have seen on Titan Network) that there are professional investors who play City of Heroes and would be more than willing to buy the game and any rights necessary to operate it off of NCSoft's hands.

    And from there, point out that if they were to sell City of Heroes rather than simply shut the game down, they would not only receive more capital to work with for their other titles, but that it would also help them retain goodwill and a positive reputation. Players would be more willing to try their other titles.

    I don't know if I should add that the player base is willing to crowdfund those efforts. What do you guys think? Would they be liable to look at that and go "that's money they could be spending on our latest games instead" if I mentioned it?

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Rubberlad View Post
    1) These executives are Korean - are we sure they can read/communicate in English or do they need a translator?
    TonyV said on the previous page that they're fluent English speakers.
  2. Minutes after this thread went up, I relayed this information to everyone I know who has played or continued to play City of Heroes and enjoyed it.

    I've got some e-mails I'm working on in the mean time, but I'm going to have ot think through on what I want to say.
  3. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Jack_NoMind View Post
    AP33 + torch chest icons, and a "military surplus" style coat with the AP33/torch logo as a tour patch.

    And a mission arc to Dimension 334E where you meet a still-living Atlas.

    Oh, statues (somewhere) of TonyV, Maressa, and Leandro (or tribute NPCs).
    I like these ideas.
  4. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Starsman View Post
    Dungeon Runners, Auto Assault, Tabula Rassa and City of Heroes never fit there. Exteel... not sure what happened to that one. I would had figure that one would fit fine toward the Asian market.
    All I recall is that Exteel died an abrupt, quiet death back in 2010. A lot like what they've tried to do with City of Heroes. I know that, like Auto Assault, Exteel did have a loyal core player base that still maintains a forum. I don't know whether or not they tried negotiating with NCSoft to sell the IP or let them host it out of their own pockets or what not.

    Massively has an article on the shutdown notice.

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Massively
    NCsoft said that the game was no longer "financially viable," adding, "We know that we have many loyal players who love Exteel. Although this decision was a painful one, in the end it was a business decision that had to be made. We encourage everyone to play and have fun with the game that you love in the time you have left."
    I can't help but wonder if by "financially viable," they didn't mean "operating at a loss" but rather "the game's still making a profit, but we're going to shut it down anyway because we can use the money to make another shiny new MMO."
  5. Quote:
    Originally Posted by damienray View Post
    Saying what kinda things ? ::suspense::
    I hope one of them tells me John has a long mustache.
  6. Quote:
    Originally Posted by gameboy1234 View Post
    While I'm personally incensed that NC Soft is cutting off CoH with so little notice, I can see it from their perspective too. CoH has been on the decline financially for a while, and the latest effort to revive it with a free to play model haven't been spectacularly successful. I think population are even lower now than last year, even though revenue might be up somewhat.
    Do we have data on that, though? The amount of people continuing to play, I mean. The IR chart I saw stopped recording active accounts years before that point.

    I mean, the servers still seemed pretty populated to me. My hometown is Guardian, and it still had a lot of people running around this year.
  7. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Pitho View Post
    I think Japan would probably be good for an expansion, though it is a smallish market.

    Still, superhero stuff is allll over their entertainment.
    Yeah, I mean, last year there was Tiger & Bunny, an anime series about superheroes.

    If you think about it, NCSoft could have taken advantage of that anime coming out to market City of Heroes in Japan. Characters in the anime series actually had corporate sponorships, like Sky High and his sponsorship with UStream.

    Just imagine if one of those characters had a Paragon Studios sponsorship logo on their uniform, or NCSoft's.
  8. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Hendrake View Post
    City of Heroes died squashed between the hentai breasts of Blade and Soul[less]
    ... Darn it, now I'm picturing this as Statesman's demise.
  9. But how else am I going to tell you that you've won two FREE iPod Nanos?!
  10. LittleDavid

    AP33 Forever!!

    You know, guys ... this could be a good impetus for holding a weekly rally to

    A) show NCSoft that we won't lose interest in saving our city that easily and,
    B) bring Atlas Park 33 back!
  11. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Ogi View Post
    Shuttering a still (apparently) profitable mmo to make way for a new one (that is not a upgrade or sequel to the shuttered mmo) should instill gobs of confidence in their intended audience that the new one might be around for not just weeks but maybe months!
    Don't worry, my confidence had long since been shattered when they did this to Tabula Rasa. City of Heroes was the only NCSoft title I'd touch, because I thought its age and the size of its player base kept NCSoft from killing it off.

    I think from now on I'll be taking my MMO money to games run by independent studios, if possible. If NCSoft really does subscribe to Electronic Arts' philosophy of publishing games, then I don't want anything to do with their titles, regardless of how awesome or fun they are. They'll all get put on the chopping block the moment they stop being profitable "enough."
  12. ... And now I'm left to wonder if Wolfenstein 3D has been ported to the Nintendo 3DS yet ...

  13. LittleDavid

    Confessions

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
    We are by far the most incredibly ******-up MMO players in the whole of creation.
    Which reminds me! If I can find the time before the game ends I want to have my Tanker fight Hamidon ...








    Oh, confessions, right, right ...

    Yeah, that guy's mine.

    ... That counts as a confession, right?
  14. LittleDavid

    AP33 Forever!!

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Zekiran_Immortal View Post
    Yeah I know, my housemate who doesn't play wants to make stickers at work, actually.

    >_> Jesse does need a new pc... and does commissions. and he's quite good. He does have paypal. Spread the word.
    Tell him to use the logo to make shirts and mugs on Cafepress! Or Zazzle! Or some place like that!

    You can make red custom t-shirts on Zazzle!
  15. Japan, at least, has their own flavor of superheroes in the form of sentai squads and the like. In fact, I think City of Heroes used to have a sizable population of Japanese players. I've seen Japanese fan sites for CoH before, like this one:

    geocities.co.jp/SiliconValley-SanJose/4850/coh/index.html

    I wonder how much NCSoft tried marketing City of Heroes in Japan, anyway?

    EDIT: Also came across this, with the Wayback Machine. Justice Japan, which looks like it was mostly active around 2004~2005. A few sites on that Geocities.jp link list involve Justice ... I wonder if it was their unofficial server. Reminds me of the "Ally of Justice" phrase I see pop up every now and then in regards to do-gooders in Japanese stuff.
  16. LittleDavid

    AP33 Forever!!

    If City of Heroes lives on somehow and the band at Paragon Studios is put back together, I say gec72's Atlas Park #33 logo should totally be in-game as a selectable emblem for superhero costumes.

    And that flag, Zekiran_Immortal? That would be worthy of a t-shirt. And a coffee mug. I would totally buy one of each.

    MAKE IT HAPPEN. PLEASE.
  17. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Markovia
    Electronic games are a new medium, MMO games even more so. The custodians of art and culture have yet to recognise it as art, or as part of our culture, or as worthy of preservation. Like the early silent films that were melted down to make boot heels, or the early episodes of Dr Who that were erased by the BBC to save on magnetic tape, it will be lost forever when the servers go down, because it was too new and too garish and too low-brow for anyone to think we’d ever seriously regret its loss.
    Bingo.

    This is a point that Jason Scott made when AOL shut down AOL Hometown and Yahoo shut down Geocities.

    (Yeah, I keep bringing him up, but honestly I think the situation is comparable and applicable.)
  18. Quote:
    Originally Posted by vulpish_one View Post
    Seriously, I'm glad Ms. Day saw fit to support our efforts.
    You could say that our cause ...

    *puts on visor-helmet*

    ... has seen the light of Day.
  19. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Desi_Nova View Post
    TBH it looked like they took that first version, Tweaked it a little and turned it into Aion.
    ...

    I have never thought about it that way before.
  20. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Atlantea View Post
    I wish I could think of anything to add other than wild applause! Well said!!
    I can!

    If a picture's worth a thousand words, this is the perfect description of Electric Knight's post:

  21. Looks like the naysayers are gaining ground ... it's back down to 88.6%.
  22. Also, for anyone who's a fan of Wing Commander like I am, I recommend the Wing Commander Saga. It's a fan game, a full-length campaign set during the time of Wing Commander III, developed with the Freespace 2 engine, and has taken about as much time to develop as City of Heroes has been around. For a game running on an engine that old, it looks pretty darned sweet.
  23. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Angry_Citizen View Post
    World of Warcraft involves about a hundred times more people (at LEAST), constituting a greater share of the population than some US states. The only news articles I've ever seen on World of Warcraft - and this coming from a connoisseur of politics and news the likes most of you have probably never seen - is a story in which the medical community examined the impact and spread of a plague bug. If there are others, I haven't seen them.
    So what? They also cover topics in gaming that don't involve games with a population greater than some U.S. states. Look here, at their TECH page: they have an entire category devoted to "gaming and gadgets." CNN has other resources devoted to covering African warlords; they can afford to talk about the Civilization II player who created a hellish nightmare world by playing the same game for ten years or Diablo III being a broken game along with the uprisings in Syria and bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan. By that metric, an organized effort by an MMO community to make the publishing company consider doing something other than it shutting it down and sitting on the IP is surely just as newsworthy.

    Go contact CNN, tell them they need to "grow up" and stop wasting whatever resources you think they're wasting on the "whining and screaming and crying" of "crack addicts desperate for a fix." Your belittling the City of Heroes community for trying to use iReport, to the best of my knowledge, as it was intended by CNN is not going to gain any track with anyone here.
  24. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Xzero45 View Post
    Never heard of those. I'll have to check 'em out. And this video and this video best demonstrate how I feel about modern day FPS games.
    Haha! I still love the Quake one.

    Black Mesa Source is a fan-created project as a response to Valve releasing Half-Life 1 for the Source engine. People were disappointed that the game didn't receive a comprehensive graphics update to match that of Half-Life 2, so a team of indie developers began working on a Source game that would do the job.

    They are really going the whole nine yards, too. Bringing voice actors in to help re-voice a lot of old dialogue. The trailers they've put out over the years are amazing. Gabe Newell himself has said he really wants to play it.

    On that note, I also recommend Renegade-X: Beyond Black Dawn. That one was released earlier this year, a fan-created update of Command and Conquer: Renegade using the Unreal Development Kit that Epic Games released a few years ago. Beyond Black Dawn is a short single-player campaign that follows on from Renegade's storyline, but the real meat is the online play.

    I really need to fix my video card ...